They skip it because it's a pain and they're rushing. A good spray gun helps, but you still have to do the prep work right. What gun are you looking at?

Oh man, my mate spent a whole weekend trying to find his sound card driver disc once. He had the whole OS running but no sound for days, it was a proper mission. There was a weird sense of victory when he finally got the tinny speakers to work.

Exactly, it's wild how much a good tool changes things. Had the same shock with a torque angle gauge on cylinder heads, went from guessing to perfect stretch every time. Makes you question everything in the toolbox.

Totally, boot servers are the way to go for that many machines. Watched a tech at my old college do a whole lab of thirty in about an hour once. They had all the desktops on a switch and just pushed one image out. The setup took them a morning to get right, but then it was just coffee and waiting. For a one-off batch of three hundred, doing six at a time sounds like a proper slog.

Feel your pain, that's the worst kind of paranoia. Try to just watch the road a few car lengths ahead instead of right in front of you. You'll see the bigger stuff in time without having to stare at every little speck.